Reality Check for Real Estate Shows

Steve Ruark for The New York Times

By BRIAN STELTER
Published: May 21, 2009

TLC

A renovation on TLC’s “Flip That House.”

IT’S not often that a television host advocates for fewer minutes on the air. But one senses that Mike Aubrey, the real estate agent who assesses homes for the coming HGTV series “Real Estate Intervention,” would be happy to have fewer homeowners to counsel. Mr. Aubrey is part agent, part therapist on the show, which shows distressed homeowners how to cope with the collapse of the housing market. Standing on the porch of a charming two-bedroom home on a leafy street here recently, Mr. Aubrey noted that if “Real Estate Intervention” had been in production five years ago at the height of the housing boom, “the show would be about 30 seconds long.”

“I’d walk in, I’d tell them to add $10,000 to the price of the home, I’d write ‘for sale’ on a pizza box, and I’d leave,” he said in between takes here for an episode. Nowadays Mr. Aubrey typically convinces the homeowners that their prized properties are overpriced in a depressed real estate market and they need to deal.

“Real Estate Intervention,” which will have its premiere in July, is a product of HGTV’s retooling to reflect these economic times. The cable channel — more closely associated than any other with the country’s housing crisis and the perils of easy credit and living beyond one’s means — has shelved some episodes of certain shows, edited others and ordered entirely new series in an extensive effort to set the right tone in a somber economy.

Onstage before advertisers in New York last month, the channel’s president, Jim Samples, started his presentation with the chestnut that “homes are much more than investments.” He lauded the “no-nonsense advice” on “Real Estate Intervention” and emphasized the programs that will help first-time home buyers make sense of the market. And for those homeowners who are staying put, he showcased hosts who would help them “fall back in love with the home they’re in.”

The gist was lost on no one in the ballroom: the Home & Garden Television Network, the channel of “House Hunters” and “Rate My Space,” which celebrated the conspicuous consumption of the housing boom, was programming for the Great Recession.

Reality shows of all stripes have had to acknowledge the chill on Wall Street and Main Street. MTV and VH1 have dialed down the over-the-top extravaganzas like “My Super Sweet 16” for more uplifting fare like “T. I.’s Road to Redemption.” On a coming Fox reality show called “Someone’s Gotta Go,” employees of small companies will select which of their co-workers should be fired. Even the women of the “Real Housewives” franchise on Bravo brag about being sensitive to hard times — albeit as they flaunt their familial wealth.

Cable channels are “all looking for some way to reflect the new economy,” said Michael Davies, an executive producer of “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire” and other un******ed shows. But ultimately, he added, their essences remain mostly unchanged; many of them “are completely and utterly escapist.”

HGTV, because of its subject matter, may have done more calibrating than any other channel. It has to acknowledge the crisis while still providing viewers with an escape. “We can’t stick our head in the sand,” Mr. Samples said. “We don’t want to become a news network either.”

Although he consciously shies away from the V-word, viewers will always want to be real estate voyeurs. It’s human nature to want to peek into other people’s homes and by extension their lives. The channel’s centerpiece continues to be the 10-year-old “House Hunters,” which tells buyers’ tales as they tour homes. Since its start in 1994 the channel has relied on a diet of real estate, remodeling, design and construction shows. Along with the Food Network, it is the premier brand of Scripps Networks, a company that also owns FLN, formerly known as Fine Living Network, and DIY, short for Do It Yourself. More than 1.1 million viewers watch HGTV in prime time, enough for it to rank among cable’s 20 most popular channels.

While HGTV avoided programs about house-flipping during the boom (“Flip This House” was on A&E and ”Flip That House” on TLC), it acted as a cheerleader for the market with shows like “My House Is Worth What?,” a half-hour-long celebration of home investment, and “Designed to Sell,” which promised to show how to “turn a tired house into a showpiece” with a budget of only $2,000.

The backlash has been minimal compared with the fury felt toward Wall Street — but still detectable. In January an op-ed article in The Wall Street Journal labeled HGTV a villain of the meltdown because “you couldn’t watch these shows without concluding that you must be an idiot and a loser if you lived in a house you could actually afford.” And in March, Burton Jablin, the programming chief for Scripps, was named by Time magazine as one of the 25 people to blame for the financial crisis. Scripps executives tried to laugh away the inglorious ranking by saying that Mr. Jablin was near the bottom of Time’s list. But Mr. Samples acknowledged that the company executives had some soul-searching conversations. “We honestly asked ourselves, ‘Have we been part of this?’ ” he said. “I think we reflected the enthusiasm that people had around their homes. In some cases that meant that people were making big investments in their homes, and we tried to help them make smart decisions. But it’s a stretch, and I think it’s unfair, to say that HGTV fueled a housing bubble.”

Mr. Samples, who arrived at HGTV in October 2007 from the Cartoon Network, said that as the housing market deteriorated and subprime mortgages became fodder for dinner table conversations, the market changes “became an increasingly important component” of the channel’s weekly programming meetings. By early 2008 he had instructed each of his programming directors to analyze every show in the lineup to see which were relevant to the newly downsized times and, more important, which ones were not. Some of the decisions were simple. If an episode showed a homeowner marveling at the bidding war over a home, it was shelved. In other, more subtle cases, episodes were tweaked in the editing stages to make them more applicable to a sluggish market. Viewers hear fewer mentions of “zero money down” loans now. “There wasn’t a tremendous amount of it,” Mr. Samples said. “But I felt it was important to really scrub the air to make sure we maintained our credibility with the viewers.”

Amid the economic downturn HGTV has played up a marketing campaign that says, “Life’s biggest moments start at home.”

“It’s a campaign to say ‘We get it,’ ” said Lori Asbury, the network’s vice president for marketing.

New programs are trying to instill the same message. Last month HGTV added a series simply titled “For Rent.” Next Sunday it will introduce a four-family design competition show, “$250,000 Challenge,” which pledges to help the winning group pay off its mortgage. Another show, “The Unsellables,” tries to help the owners of homes that have sat on the market for months.

One of the “$250,000 Challenge” couples invested their life savings into a home at the height of the market, and are now feeling the brutal effects. Those sorts of real-life stories are central to the mission of HGTV, said Freddy James, the network’s senior vice president for programming development. And they are resulting in documentary-style shows like “Real Estate Intervention.” On a leafy Baltimore street where the “for sale” signs feel more like exasperations than exclamations, Mr. Aubrey was leading Rebekka Popov, a 30-year-old homeowner struggling with a ballooning mortgage payment, through a home similar to hers that had yet to sell. With a camera crew following, he ticked off the advantages and disadvantages that a buyer might spot.

Much of Mr. Aubrey’s advice is difficult to digest. When Ms. Popov speaks admiringly of the comparable house’s bathroom renovations and declares that she wants to make similar upgrades, he glares at her.

“Do you have the money to do it?”

“No.”

“So it’s not an option.”

“No, it’s not.”

The message is crystal clear, at least to the viewer: it’s a buyers’ market.

CableU, a company that studies cable programming, said in a recent report that HGTV’s programming makeover “has helped focus the network to match the mood and needs of its viewers.” After months of stagnant ratings, the network started to show some slight growth in March, around the same time that housing prognosticators were calling the bottom of the market.

While the shows that are having their premieres now are geared for the downturn, Mr. Samples and Mr. James are already thinking ahead to the housing recovery. The executives at HGTV now receive regular e-mail updates about housing sales and economic indicators from the company’s research team. They are keeping a particularly close eye on the figures about first-time home buyers. Somewhere, they hope, new housing-television viewers are entering the marketplace.

Real estate novices are the “first glimmer of hope that we’re seeing,” Mr. Samples said.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/24/ar...ewanted=1&_r=1

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Más brotes verdes:

Up To 75% Of Modified Mortgages To Re-Default -Fitch

Mortgages that are modified only delay the inevitable, said Fitch Ratings, which predicts up to 75% of such loans will re-default after 12 months.

"Loan modifications hold clear value for many homeowners provided the modified payments are sustainable, but more often than not reducing the home payments to an affordable level may not be enough to rescue borrowers who are overextended on other credit and expenses," said Fitch Managing Director Diane Pendley.

She added that as home prices continue to fall, "there is growing evidence that some homeowners are voluntarily walking away from their homes even if they can financially afford to stay."

Falling home prices have been a key reason for surging delinquencies, as borrowers are unable to refinance their mortgage as the loan amount is higher than the value of the home. As such, people are opting to stop paying the loan and instead deal with the consequences on their credit record.

Critics of loan-modification efforts have said without notable reduction to principal amounts, delinquencies and foreclosures aren't expected to be significantly reduced.

Fitch said through April, 7% of loans in residential mortgage-backed securities, including 18% of subprime loans, were modified.

The ratings agency's prediction comes as Standard & Poor's Ratings Services said home-loan delinquencies eased among some categories in April.

-By Kevin Kingsbury, Dow Jones Newswires; 201-938-2136; kevin.kingsbury@dowjones.com

Article - WSJ.com

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ojo ojo:

U.S. consumer mood lifts despite home price plunge | U.S. | Reuters

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en abril también se disparó la confianza pero cayó el consumo

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Ya que la noticía principal, la del incremento de la morosidad, se trataba ayer en otro hilo, nos alegraremos la vida con algo más de Zoom. En concreto, la Florída de los Estados Unidos. Cualquier parecido a la Florída de la Unión Europea es aleatorio...

More Florida homeowners fall behind on payments

About one in four Florida borrowers was late on their mortgage or in foreclosure in the first three months of the year, a new study found.
By MONICA HATCHER
mhatcher@MiamiHerald.com

The faltering economy and falling home prices plunged an additional 99,000 Florida borrowers into foreclosure in the first three months of the year, bringing the total number of home loans in some stage of the foreclosure process to 374,134.

With 11 percent of its home loans in foreclosure, Florida ranked first in the country for defaults and was the only state in double digits. The rate was up roughly 2 percent from the previous quarter, according to figures released Thursday by the Mortgage Bankers Association.

The national rate was 3.85 percent, up about half a percent from the previous quarter, which represented a record high.

As job losses mounted and incomes dwindled, more and more homeowners fell behind on their loans, with payment problems socking greater numbers of previously credit-worthy borrowers who have traditional mortgages.

The delinquency rates for loans 30 days or more past due stood at 10.67 percent in Florida, or about 378,000 of some 3.54 million loans.

The rate dipped slightly from the previous quarter, but that is always the case at the start of the year, said Jay Brinkmann, chief economist for the MBA. The rate nationally was 9.12 percent. Florida's crisis is particularly acute because of the staggering run-up in real estate values during the housing boom. People rushed to get loans to buy property that, in many cases, they could not afford. When prices collapsed, homeowners were stuck, unable to sell or refinance. Others were caught in adjustable-rate mortgages with payments that soared.

With Florida home values continuing to fall, Brinkmann predicted foreclosures would continue to rise through the rest of the year. A large oversupply of new property makes stabilizing home prices in the state likely a distant prospect.

''It's going to take getting demand even with supply just to put a floor under prices. Even then, it may not get it up to a point where it gets buyers back above water,'' Brinkmann said.

At the end of March, roughly 71 percent of owners who bought in Miami-Dade and Broward counties in the past five years were underwater, or owed more than their homes were worth, according to Web-based real estate services firm Zillow.com.

Analysts have said so-called negative equity is one of the biggest reasons why borrowers fall into foreclosure -- if they need to sell, they can't, at least not for enough to cover the debt, or, they choose to throw in the towel, thinking it's better to take their losses and rent.

While most lenders have established loan modification programs and are helping borrowers reduce their monthly payments through things like interest rate reductions and extended terms, many homeowners are falling back into default. A recent study by Fitch Ratings projected that as many as 75 percent of subprime loan modifications would fall behind by 60 days or more within a year. Brinkmann said that so-called redefaults could show up in the new foreclosure statistics: ``There may be repeat visitors coming back into the numbers.''

More Florida homeowners fall behind on payments - Business - MiamiHerald.com

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espejismos de esperanza en medio del tunel se denomina

Y por que nopueden ser indicios reales???????????

Estados Unidos: ¿De Guatemala a Guatepeor? - cotizalia.com

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